The year of the team

Work smarter, better, and faster with weekly tips and how-tos.

My co-founder Scott and I believe work is at a tipping point, facing the biggest change since the industrial revolution. Globalization, the gig economy, talent gaps, lengthening career spans and the impact of every company now being a software company has created the most complex and challenging dynamic any workforce has seen. There are 900 million knowledge workers globally and the most important aspect of productivity is how well they work together in this new reality.

That’s why making teamwork work is the defining challenge and opportunity of our era. ￼It’s what will allow industries to deliver the achievements the world needs – curing cancer, creating clean energy, solving for world hunger, colonizing Mars. At Atlassian, that’s the game we’re in. We’re taking a bold approach to create an operating system for teams that supports the critical functions of teamwork: organizing, discussing, and completing work.

Making teamwork work is the defining challenge and opportunity of our era.

Together with our 60,000 customers Atlassian is transforming team productivity, just like Microsoft transformed personal productivity. But as work shifts from amplifying the individual to focusing on teams, productivity must be redefined as a true team sport. And AI will play a major role. Not just in facilitating teamwork, but as an active team member. The question isn’t will you have a bot on your team, but rather, how many bots will you have on your team. We’ve got to pair team and machine.

Our annual customer conference, Summit 2016, kicks off today and we’re showcasing how Atlassian is innovating to deliver the horsepower and scale teams need so they can work even better together tomorrow than they do today. We’ll introduce industry firsts with Hipchat; new features for Jira Service Desk that will open it to new markets; new capabilities across our products designed for the world’s largest, most demanding enterprises; new features in Confluence that allow teams to incorporate modern work content into the content editor; and more.

Read on for details of the exciting new capabilities we’re unveiling at Summit. You’ll also learn how more than 50 of our partners across more than 15 countries have joined us in the Pledge 1% movement that is changing the face of corporate philanthropy.

SAML 2.0 Support: SAML 2.0 support will enable single sign-on across all Data Center products. This is essential for organizations adopting SAML as their corporate identity standard. SAML 2.0 support starts with Jira Software and Bitbucket, with Confluence and Jira Service Desk support following.

Jira Service Desk launches for external support

Jira Service Desk can help not only internal IT but also external support teams who want to use customer feedback to guide product development. In fact, one third of Jira Service Desk customers already use it exclusively to support customers outside their organizations, according to a recent Atlassian survey. When used for external support, Jira Service Desk makes it easier for support agents to have visibility into development activities and customer feedback can be piped right back into product development. Today, we’re adding new capabilities to help external customer support teams, including:

Grouping customers into organizations: End users within the same company can now easily share and collaborate on each other’s tickets and support agents can provide each company with personalized support.

Personalizing emails sent to customers: Customer communications and emails can now be branded and customized, including localization support and fine-grained control over notifications.

Bitbucket bets on the future of software development in the cloud

Source code in the cloud used to be unthinkable due to security and reliability concerns, but momentum has shifted. The trend today is that “If you build for cloud, you should build in the cloud.” Bitbucket has seen a massive trend in this direction, growing from 50,000 teams using Bitbucket Cloud in 2013 to more than 900,000 professional software teams moving their source code to the cloud today. To help our customers scale in the cloud, today we’re announcing new features focused on security, collaboration, and performance:

Bitbucket Pipelines: Your team can build, test, and deploy from Bitbucket. Pipelines is built right within Bitbucket, giving you end-to-end visibility from coding to deployment. With Bitbucket there’s no CI server to set up, user management to configure, or repositories to synchronize.

Git Large File Storage (LFS): Developers using large binary files and rich media can now collaborate on 80+ file types of any size and store all their files in one place. Git LFS stores your large files externally and keeps your actual Git repository lightweight, resulting in faster cloning and fetching times.

Smart Mirroring: Smart Mirroring can drastically improve read (clone, fetch, pull) performance for distributed teams working with large repositories by making them available locally in your own network.

Merge checks: To help customize your workflow, you can set checks to control when a pull request can be merged. You can set checks like requiring a minimum number of approvals, requiring tasks to be resolved, enforcing a minimum number of successful builds, and more.

Atlassian redesigns channel program

Born of our unique self-service sales approach, Atlassian has a thriving ecosystem of channel partners that extend professional and consulting services to Atlassian customers in more than 70 countries. At Summit 2016, we’ll unveil a new Solution Partner program to ensure that as our business grows and expands globally, our channel program can scale to meet new demand with an experienced and skilled ecosystem. The changes to Atlassian’s new channel program include:

Solutions Partners: A new program brand, Solutions Partners, with multiple program tiers (Silver, Gold, and Platinum) so Partners can differentiate and market themselves to customers.

Charlie Academy: A new learning management platform, Charlie Academy, to better educate and skill up our Partners to provide professional services and integration support.

Accreditations program: A new accreditations program and minimum certification requirements for Atlassian Solution Partners based on program tier.

Together we can make real change – join Pledge 1%

Pledge 1% is a global movement changing the face of corporate philanthropy by inspiring companies to incorporate giving back into their DNA. Companies pledge 1% of equity, profit, product, and/or time to causes of their choosing, making the community a key stakeholder in their business.

As a founding partner, Atlassian is so proud to announce that more than 50 Atlassian partners from 17 countries, including 40% of our Summit sponsors, have joined the Pledge 1% movement. The impact our ecosystem can have on our communities and our world is thrilling. Overall, more than 1,000 companies from 30 countries have taken the pledge to date.

Ready to take the Pledge?

Pledge 1% provides information, resources, legal documents, and case studies to demystify the process of pledging 1%, and lets people make the pledge and get help with the process right from the site. There’s no better time than today to start making a difference. Be part of the solution and take the pledge!

Wait, there’s more!

In today’s keynote, we also discussed exciting advancements across products and unveiled how we continue to make the products work even better together. Throughout Summit, customers will share how Atlassian is improving teamwork at their companies. If you aren’t able to attend, join the conversation during the live-stream of the keynotes and catch the recorded sessions at https://www.atlassian.com/summit/watch-sessions.

At Atlassian, our mission is to unleash the potential in every team. Today marks another great step.